[pkg-gnupg-maint] Behavioral change for pinentry-qt 1.2.0-1

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Hi Gard--

Sorry for the delay in responding here.

On Mon 2022-05-02 09:33:14 +0200, Gard Spreemann wrote:

> I run Sway as my Wayland compositor, and use pinentry-qt as my GPG pin
> entry program. With pinentry-qt 1.1.0-4, a dialog box asking for a
> passphrase would appear as a small, *floating* dialog box on top of
> everything else, as desired. Starting with pinentry-qt 1.2.0-1, however,
> the dialog box is treated as a normal application window, and is "tiled
> in" by Sway (taking perhaps half, perhaps a quarter, of my screen).

this is interesting, but i'm not deep enough into a QT or sway to know
what signal is used by sway to know to "float" a window or not.  Do you
know what that is?

> I have no special settings in Sway for this purpose, which leads me to
> suggest that something changed in pinentry-qt that makes its pop-up
> windows no longer recognizable as dialog boxes. Do you have any ideas?

It seems possible that the fact that 1.2.0-1 is built against a newer
version of QT (because the build daemons have it available) could have
caused the change you're seeing, but a *lot* has changed in the qt
pinentry upstream between 1.1.0 and 1.2.0.  If you have a chance to do a
bit more technical investigation, i'd consider running a simple test
like this to observe whether a given pinentry behaves as you describe:

     echo getpin | path/to/pinentry-qt

And then use that test over a "git bisect" based on upstream's repo
(https://dev.gnupg.org/source/pinentry.git), to see whether you can
identify a specific commit that caused the difference.

Whether you're able to identify the problem or not, you might want to
open an issue on upstream's bugtracker (https://dev.gnupg.org/).  If you
do that, please point to it here, i'd be interested in learning more.

         --dkg
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